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Turning Away from

Mauthausen Concentration Camp

Was Not an Option

By Fyllis Hockman

While the architectural grandeur and resounding history of the four Central European capitals – Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest – were overwhelming and wondrous, the biggest impact on our Grand Circle Danube River Cruise was made at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, one of the first to be built and the last to be liberated.

My first visual exposure to the horrors of the Holocaust came as a teen-ager in newsreel depictions of the emaciated survivors with their sunken eyes and gaunt bodies liberated from some camps at the end of World War II.

It helped me understand what my mother told me about the Holocaust. Six decades later, I came to understand even more.

Mauthausen, one of the largest of the camps, was built high up an Austrian hill in Linz, where Hitler was once a resident, near a large quarry. The rationale behind concentration camps evolved over the war years from imprisoning people, enslaving them and engendering fear among the general populace to simply one of extermination.

Mauthausen was considered a Level 3 Camp. The guiding principle was simple: everyone was to be killed some way or other. The SS excelled at methods of mutilation and annihilation.

The roots of this genocide, according to our guide, were fostered in and fueled by anti-Semitism.

Many bodies fed “the stairs of death” leading to and from the quarry where malnourished and mistreated prisoners were forced to carry heavy stones up very high stairs and often died in the process. Others were simply pushed down the steps. These stairs still jut out of their peaceful and bucolic setting as cold reminders of the past.  

Prisoners also were forced outside during winter and had cold water poured over them. This was a particularly appealing entertainment for the SS guards who delighted in “showering” people to death – outside the actual gas chamber showers, that is.

Another favorite SS sport was to entice prisoners into situations where they might appear to be escaping – and then shoot them. Any soldier who shot an inmate trying to escape got extra days off.

Others prisoners, sick and beaten, simply died during daily roll call, a grueling process of standing in the heat or cold for four to five hours and being forced to do exercises when most of them could no longer stand.

Students tour Mauthausen

In the barracks, hundreds were housed in such degraded conditions the term unsanitary does not begin to describe them.

On a wall is written the “wheezing, hissing, moaning, sobbing, snoring” that filled the night-time air in 20 languages: “The noise fused into a single, terrible sound produced as if by a giant monstrous being that had holed up in the dark.” Another wall writer wrote: “Anyone who hadn’t been brutal when they entered the world became brutal here.”

Our tour took us to the gas chambers where thousands were killed and the ovens where their remains were burned, with a side visit to the infirmary where unspeakable experiments were carried out.

Despite being within earshot of the thousands of prisoners suffering and screaming, the neighbors in the surrounding community claimed ignorance of what was happening. Some complained about the noise, but not about why it was occurring.

The grandmother of our guide, who was seven at the time, said she could smell the stench of the burning bodies. She knew something bad was happening but nobody talked about it.

Of the 200,000 prisoners who occupied Mauthausen from 1938 to 1945, about half were killed. There were only 20,000 survivors when liberation finally came on May 5, 1945. Some 80,000 were already too ill to benefit from the end of the war.

Most of the guards went home after the war suffering no consequences and little was said about what they had done. No one talked about it. According to our guide, it took Austria four decades to acknowledge its part in the Holocaust.

There were several teen-aged school groups visiting the camp and I felt thankful they were learning of these atrocities. The Holocaust will be relegated to the status of other historical occurrences the young will hear about in class but will not relate to. Who really cares about the Crusades?